If you aren’t an avid poker player, you may not have heard that the Department of Justice/FBI have recently take some very aggressive action against the game of poker as played through the internet. How aggressive? Well, just click on over to any one of FullTiltpoker, Pokerstars, or Absolutepoker and you’ll find the following notice.

I’ve been your sponsor for a number of years now. I’ve lost track as to how many. I hope things are going well for you and that it’s making a difference in your life. Since this is my first letter, I guess I’ll tell you a bit about myself.

I have a 9-year old daughter. I attached her picture so you can see her. She’s almost your age. We have a lot of fun together. I got divorced from her mother a long time ago. I think that it was the sense of loss from the divorce that caused me to decide to become a sponsor.

These days I’ve gotten remarried. A lot of time people in these circumstances fight quite a bit with their former spouses, but I am lucky in that we all get along very well. My ex-wife and my new wife work together with me to give our daughter a good childhood, and it makes me very happy.

As for what I do, I’m a professional gambler. There’s a card game called Poker that I make a good bit of money at. I find it strange that I receive more money doing something that doesn’t really give much back to society. I went to college and got degrees in Chemistry and Geology, but pursuing those jobs just didn’t pay very well. In fact, my first job was working for the Department of Justice in a Crime Lab to help put away criminals. I made so little in that job that I couldn’t afford to pay back the loans I took out to go to school.

I’m sure this all must seem rather strange to you. We live in very different worlds. I am curious to hear what life must be like in Ghanna. Again, I hope my modest contribution is making a difference in your life.

Once upon a time, back when Vampire: the Eternal Struggle Collectible Card game was actually in print, I played a fair amount of it. Then we all ended up friending each other on Facebook. And then Facebook recommends other friends based on the friends you have, and pretty soon you have people on your Facebook friends you’ve never met. That’s all well and good, but inevitably you end up in these political discussions with “friends” who are really strangers and you realize you have no common ground with these people. Worse, you don’t have the luxury of death actually meeting these people to keep things civil.

These exchanges tend to be a waste of time. Inevitably I end up discussing politics with people who parrot a few tidbits of history to support their rather outlandish points of view. These kind of discourses them to be rather tiresome, but I thought the one I had today was rather funny.

Pathfinder has increasingly become my roleplaying game of choice; there is also a growing division between those players who prefer its Adventure Paths (geared toward smaller groups in a home-setting) to its ‘Society’ games (designed for the typical one-shot run at a gaming convention). Breaking it down, Adventure Paths are written to tell a coherent storyline over the effective lifetime of your characters — which, for most Adventure Paths, is level 1 to around 12 or 14. Society games tend toward a similar character lifetime (levels 1-12), but are instead a series of adventures which return the character to an episodic stasis at the end of each adventure. Not surprising, these adventures tend to lack the expected niceties of an overarching plot, or even recurring NPCs, though, you’re often playing these adventures with a different assortment of players from one Society game to another.

I begun hosting Pathfinder Society games at my home in order to meet new Pathfinder players, the ultimate goal being to find those who would be interested in engaging in a more regular Adventure Path game. Surprisingly, to me anyway, I came across some exclusively interested in Society games. It seemed the main appeal there was the official nature of the Society game: requiring the GM to register each section online plus filling out a Chronicle sheet for each player that specifically documents their progress over that adventure. This allows the player to attend a convention and play an officially sanctioned character (which he or she has played before) that has been built up over the course of several adventures. For some players, it would seem this engenders a sense of accomplishment; if the Pathfinder session in which they’re currently playing (read: Adventure Path) isn’t furthering this official standing of their character — they just aren’t interested.